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md_ wrote

It was mentioned by others to, but really the point here is that "it is okay to make fun of those in power". There are power imbalances out there, that change how we react to a joke. Me making a joke about some person or group of people (or a characteristic robustly associated with said person/people) who are subjugated, is problematic. Me making fun of a person, people, or societal structure that has power over me, is the least I can do to resist. That's how we tease apart bad-taste jokes, from actually problematic jokes. Do they punch down, or do they punch up?

Of course that's assuming that the comment was indeed a joke, but trying to tell jokes and sincere opinions apart online is increasingly a frustrating task. To me it looked like very transparent trolling, but you can hardly now any more.

In short though, of course, if it's not a joke and someone sincerely holds the opinion that white genocide is a valid political program, of course that's problematic bullshit and clearly authoritarian. But it will get us nowhere to try and guess if they were joking all along, because of the medium. But find me a political group that claims to be anti-authoritarian and be pro-genocide, and of course things there will be pretty clear-cut.

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dele_ted wrote

As i said in the original thread, and multiple times in this thread, I didn't think c0mrade was joking. I also explained why in my response to Dumai.

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md_ wrote

Fair enough, it is frustratingly hard to tell, especially because claiming "it was a joke bro" has been used, with surprising success, by a lot of authoritarians online when they were punching down.

Incidentally, this is why I do not want to seize the "memes" of production. So many products of internet culture (including the "it was a joke" after-the-fact defence) are authoritarian by design, and we only taint ourselves by trying to use them.

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